Abstract
Satellite scatterometers provide the only regular observations of surface wind vectors over vast swaths of the world oceans, including coastal regions, which are of great scientific and societal interest but still present challenges for remote sensing. Here we demonstrate systematic scatterometer wind errors near Hawaii's Big Island: Two counter‐rotating lee vortices, which are clear in the International Comprehensive Ocean‐Atmosphere Data Set ship‐based wind climatology and in aircraft observations, are absent in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Remote Sensing Systems scatterometer wind climatologies. We demonstrate similar errors in the representation of transient Catalina Eddy events in the Southern California Bight. These errors likely arise from the nonuniqueness of scatterometer wind observations, that is, an “ambiguity removal” is required during processing to select from multiple wind solutions to the geophysical model function. We discuss strategies to improve the ambiguity selection near coastal mountains, where small‐scale wind reversals are common.
Highlights
Satellite scatterometers provide daily observations of surface winds and surface wind stress over the global oceans
The Hawaii Regional Climate Model (HRCM) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model winds resolve the orographically forced mesoscale wind features much better than coarse numerical weather prediction (NWP) winds (Figure 1), so we can expect improvement in the climatology of QuikSCAT winds produced using the HRCM WRF winds for the nudge field
We identify systematic scatterometer wind errors in the lee of Hawaii's Big Island and in the Southern California Bight, two regions with strong orographic influence on surface winds
Summary
Satellite scatterometers provide daily observations of surface winds and surface wind stress over the global oceans. The wind errors near Hawaii and southern California indicate a systematic problem with the ambiguity removal in regions of strong orographic forcing, where small‐scale wind features are common. Our results imply that wind stress curl in regions of strong orographic forcing is substantially larger than estimated in previous studies (e.g., Chelton et al, 2004; Xie et al, 2001), with consequences for coastal ocean circulation.
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